When it comes to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), VMware is noticeably involved with a spectrum of products to deliver software-defined storage (SDS). VMware taps into a significant share of the converged storage market. As Gartner states in its Magic Quadrant Report, VMware “offers the broadest set of hyperconverged solutions — either as a turnkey software appliance, as a rack-scale software-defined data center solution (VMware Cloud Foundation) or as HCIaaS — to meet the diverse performance, scalability, security and total cost of ownership (TCO) needs of organizations.”
HCI is the converged storage product that combines storage, compute, and networking functions to establish cloud networking, remote office/branch office (ROBO), disaster recovery, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Enterprises pursue HCI for several reasons, including its virtualization capabilities, it’s cost-effectiveness, it’s heightened data protection, and its ability to deploy quickly. The HCI architecture places the storage, compute, and networking functions behind a hypervisor. The key to HCI technologies is its reliance on software-defined networking (SDN) to virtualize the storage center.
Source: VMware
VMware Converged Storage and Its Cybersecurity Protection
VMware highlights data protection and security as one of its converged storage’s primary benefits. Particularly, in an increasingly connected world, cybersecurity remains one of the most highly discussed issues among IT professionals, entrepreneurs, and government officials. Realizing the increasing importance of cybersecurity, VMware converged storage features a software-defined encryption component to its vSAN, which is an all-flash, secure, shared storage. The company states that encrypting data at the core offers significant benefits to thwart cybersecurity attacks: simplified media disposal versus physically destroying sensitive media and the capability to encrypt all data formats.
The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) chose VMware’s vSAN along with its vSphere for securing government storage. In April 2018, VMware published a press release touting the Defense Information Systems Agency’s (DISA) decision to incorporate the company’s vSAN and vSphere products to the VMware vSphere Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG). STIG is the DoD’s IT guidebook for setting up the required cybersecurity protocols and procedures across all DoD’s IT architectures.
The company is also offering its products to other governmental agencies at all levels – federal, state, and local. Its site features resources catered to all three subsets of governmental agencies on how to secure storage and protect government data.